Ray Davies explores 'Americana' in new book

Singer-songwriter Ray Davies of Kinks fame has a new memoir, "Americana," out this fall. Paul Bergen, Redferns/Getty Images

In a way, singer-songwriter Ray Davies has been searching for his place in America all his life.

As a North London lad in the ’50s he sat transfixed as black-and-white flickers of cowboys and Indians danced across the screen. The needle of an old-fashioned record player spun dreams from the grooves it carved, fantasies formed of American jazz, blues, country and rock ’n’ roll.

Barely out of his teens when his band the Kinks first reached the United States in 1964 on the first wave of the British Invasion, Davies watched the country rolling past in colors filtered through the lens of a tour bus windshield, an airplane’s porthole window.

A decade ago, confined to a New Orleans hospital bed, a mugger’s bullet in his leg, Davies says he was still thinking about this country and the culture and music that had endlessly fascinated him. A passing comment from a doctor set him on another quest to discover America, this time in words, and led to a book delivered this fall, Americana – The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story.

“The first pages came about when I was in the hospital after being shot,” Davies says by phone from a hotel room in New York City recently. “I was quite traumatized and one of my emergency doctors, who had been an amateur screenwriter, said, ‘What do you for a living?’ He didn’t know who I was.

“I said, ‘I’m a songwriter,’ and he said, ‘Well, treat it like a song, write about it.’”

Which is exactly what Davies did. He’d already written one memoir, X-Ray: The Unauthorized Biography, an unusually literate work of rock autobiography, that used a fictional interviewer to elicit stories from Davies about the first three decades of his life and career. Just as that book eschewed the straight narrative, so too does Americana.

“I kept a strict diary every day, more or less to keep my own senses of being together,” Davies says. “But I tried to detach myself from the material after awhile. I didn’t want a linear journey through this.

“The book is a journey. It’s a journey of my going down to New Orleans in the first place, but it’s also about my journey with the Kinks, after being banned (in the United States) for four years, and then the journey back after being relatively obscure for awhile.

“In a strange way, I constructed it in much the same way I’d construct a song,” Davies says. “I start with a punchy opening, and then engage the reader into a verse.”

His story jumps back and forth in time from chapter to chapter, opening with him shot in New Orleans after chasing the snatcher of a lady friend’s purse, then skipping back to the Kinks first tour of America, then back to England a few years before the shooting.

We wondered how he viewed the author’s role as adjudicator of literal facts versus emotional truths in the writing of his story.

“It’s a balance,” Davies says. “Emotions are difficult things for me to write about and sometimes I convey them in a more oblique sense rather than a strictly factual one. I think it’s because of my work as a songwriter, it’s taught me to do that.

“A song like ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ is a send-up of a man who wanted to follow fashion and became stupid,” he says. “I started off with an angry song but then realized that humor was a good way to say it.”

Singer-songwriter Ray Davies of Kinks fame has a new memoir, "Americana," out this fall. Paul Bergen, Redferns/Getty Images
Ray Davies' new memoir "Americana" focuses on his life and the Kinks career in the United States.
The Kinks singer-songwriter Ray Davies, 59 at this time, walks with his daughter, Eva, 7, after he received a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to music, at Buckingham Palace in London on March 17, 2004. Davies was using a walking stick after being shot in the leg by a mugger two months ago. AP Photo/Peter Simpson
The four members of the British rock group the Kinks, from Muswell Hill, joke around with a double-decker bus on a London street on Sept. 7, 1964. Posing from left are, Dave Davies; Mick Avory, in driver's seat; Pete Quaife and Ray Davies. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Musician Ray Davies poses in New York on April 23, 1998. The former frontman of the groundbreaking British rock band the Kinks was presented with an Icon award on Tuesday Oct. 3, 2006 for what organizers said was his enduring influence on generations of music makers. RICHARD DREW, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ray Davies, pictured here in a shoot for a solo album several years ago.
The Kinks on an early tour of the United States.
Ray Davies performs an acoustic set at the Grove of Anaheim in 2008. Christina House, For The Orange County Register
Ray Davies entertains the crowd with a special acoustic performance at the Grove of Anaheim in July 2008. Christina House, For the Orange County Register

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